Introduction: Infrastructuring Value

ABSTRACT

Exploring infrastructure has much to offer for economic anthropology. Inspired by the convergence of literatures on value and infrastructure in studies of financialisation, we develop the analytics of ‘infrastructures of value’ on old terrain: agriculture. Infrastructure facilitates valuation practices and enables valorisation as fixed capital. Material networks emerging from practices of infrastructuring also mediate value by facilitating, channelling, or hindering the circulation – movement and metamorphoses – of objects, people and ideas. Shifting attention from the social life of things to the infrastructure undergirding their circulation fills a major gap in David Graeber’s theory of value: it directs attention to how actions become incorporated into larger wholes. Various infrastructures and the frictions between them shape value by connecting producers and consumers, separating contents, and communicating evidence of qualities of food. Ethnographic attention to this material relationality of value invigorates dialogue between new and historical materialism and challenges binaries in economic thought.

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• infrastructure
• standards
• singularities
• valuation

Acknowledgements

The idea for this special issue first emerged at the workshop ‘Consuming the Unique: Food, Art and the Globalizing Infrastructures of Value’ organised by Daniel Monterescu and André Thiemann (9-10 May 2019, Central European University, Budapest). The first version of the introduction benefited from the close and critical reading by Gerti Seiser (an inspiring teacher at the University of Vienna who introduced one of us to economic anthropology). Participants in the workshop ‘Infrastructures of Value: Uniqueness and Genericness in Agri-Food Chains’ at the 16th EASA Biennial Conference in 2020, offered further helpful feedback, especially our contributors Daniela Ana, Oscar Krüger, Sarah Sippel, and Ted Fisher (who has supported our endeavour since the 2019 AAA conference in Vancouver). We are grateful that Mark Graham gave us the opportunity to develop this special issue and thank both of the editors and the anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions. Last not least, we thank Daniel Flaumenhaft for language editing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to Larkin (2013: 329, our emphasis), ‘[i]nfrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter.’ We use Marx’s term circulation, because infrastructures not only move beings, but also transform them.

2 Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivero (1990: 30–37) found ‘country folk’ in the Andes to be ‘practicing Physiocrats’. Bringing ‘theorists of the core’ and ‘practitioners of the periphery’ into conversation, however, they found that the latter answered the Physiocrats’ questions differently.

3 David Graeber (2011: 21–41) debunked this story as the myth of barter.

4 While the plurality of values is a mainstream concept in studies of food and farming, some studies of finance have also highlighted it among, for example, investors (de Bondt 2005) and in Islamic banking (Maurer 2005).

5 To avoid the loss of over-accumulated financial value, capital is invested in infrastructure with the hope of creating rent in the future (Sippel, this issue; see Appel and Kumar 2015; Muehlebach 2017; Buier, 2022). Sometimes investor profits are guaranteed by governments (Bear 2017: 2).

6 Since the 1980s, studies of conventional agriculture and ‘food regimes’ have tended to adopt a Neo-Marxist approach towards the ‘global’ structures of the production of exchange value, and the relations between the state and the market. Meanwhile, since the 1990s, studies of ‘local food systems’ and ‘alternative food networks’ have predominantly focused on the ‘local’ agency, values and consumption practices of civil society and community.

7 We start with transportation infrastructure because it fits a more conventional understanding of infrastructure, not because it is somehow more material or fundamental than others forms of infrastructure. Even digital information infrastructures like cloud computing are as material as roads, railways, and waterways (Vonderau 2019).

8 See also Cronon (1991: 89–90) on railways being constructed as competing trunk lines in the east and fanning out west of Chicago. Daniel Flaumenhaft has brought this to our attention.

9 Besides infrastructures that contain agri-food to enable – in combination with transportation infrastructure – its circulation, there are also infrastructures of containment that shape value by selectively constraining movement of goods and people: borders (Rippa 2020: 207; Kearney 2004; Paxson 2021). Yet other infrastructures of containment work by ‘protecting’ animals (e.g. on pastures) and plants (e.g. buffers around organic fields) during the agricultural production process. Stone walls, ditches, hedges, rail fences, board fences, barbed wire, electric fences, moveable fences, and their specific materialities have received sustained attention in economic history, geography and anthropology (demonstrated by this idiosyncratic choice of references: Hayter 1939; Mintz 1962; Primack 1969; Pickard 2010; Rissing 2019; Hetherington 2020). Not least the enclosure movement that transformed common lands into private property has revealed the power of walls, fences and hedges in shaping value (Polanyi 1944: 35–44).

10 We prefer Hans Ehrbar’s translation (Marx 2010b: 4) to the standard one (Marx 2015 [1867]: 25).

11 Looking at food systems as infrastructures also allows to transcend the binary between illicit and licit economies (Hayden 2022).

12 While Latour (2005), who blames ‘Marxist materialism’ for reducing the ‘bundle of ties’ of the collective of human and non-human actors to ‘a “material infrastructure” that would “determine” social relations’, Mitchell (2002: 30) objects that in

social theory there is an important exception to the rule that human action is put at the center and the external world is treated as an arena for such action rather than the source of forms of agency and power. It is found in the work of Marx.

Additional information

Funding

André Thiemann gratefully acknowledges funding by the European Regional Development Fund and the State Education Development Agency Republic of Latvia (VIAA), research grant number 1.1.1.2/VIAA/2/18/271, Agreement No. 9.-14.5/87; and by the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. Christof Lammer acknowledges the financial support of the University of Klagenfurt for language editing and open-access publishing.